Quote:
Originally Posted by Rev. Bob
Rick Cook: Wizard's Bane* (book 1), The Wizardry Compiled (book 2), The Wiz Biz II: Cursed and Consulted (books 3-4). The first two have also been available as The Wiz Biz in the past. The fifth book is not likely to ever be completed; medical reasons, IIRC.
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It's actually the 6th book which wasn't completed (which is a shame, since it would have been fun to see the skewering of the dot.com bubble), but Cook's put
part of what he'd written so far online. The 5th book,
The Wizardry Quested, is only available in paperback, though.
As for me, I've been on a nostalgia kick, revisiting one of my favourite childhood YA science fiction authors,
William Sleator, who, as I found out when I went to see what else he'd written since the last time I'd reread his books, had actually died quite some time ago while I hadn't noticed.
In any case, I've been raiding the library for his more recently-written books, and the two I just finished yesterday were:
The Boy Who Couldn't Die, whose protagonist trades his soul for immortality/invulnerability and lives to regret it as the person whom he sold it to uses it for increasingly nefarious purposes.
This suffers from a couple of problems that I'll address downpost, since they're kind of the exact same problems that the other book has.
But I'll note that it's refreshing to see a zombie book which features the classical mind-controlled horrific indestructible servant of the zombie-making sorceror, rather than the more modern interpretation of the brain-eating post-apocalyptic self-infecting rotting shambler.
and:
Hell Phone: ah, the days when picking up a cheap mobile of dubious provenance carried considerably weirder and more life-threatening risks then they do now, at least in the public imagination.
This was actually the more interesting of the two, involving a greater degree of (not to mention also a better depiction of) fear, uncertainty, and manipulation as the teenage protagonist struggles with whether or not to get caught up in the apparent bad vs. worse struggle (with an appeal to life-saving heroism) played out between the people who originally owned the phone.
But both books suffer from the problem that they're just not very well written, and far below Sleator's previously excellent standard in his heyday. There's far too much "tell" compared to "show", and the worst of it is that the really interesting angles on the stories aren't very well explored, or mentioned vaguely as a throwaway near the end.
I would have loved to have seen the story of the public reaction to that, which would probably be some sort of game-changer if it were really accepted and not dismissed as some crazy conspiracy theory cover-up. But nooooo, it gets like one paragraph in the final chapter.
Similarly, exploring the conscious and unconscious sensations of a zombie who retains full knowledge and self-control, except when being used, thus gradually becoming aware of said zombified state, and then
I'd have really liked to see the ramifications to the interpersonal relationships involved in that after the reveal, but any chance of that literally cuts off right at the last paragraph.
I suppose it's nice enough that the characters get to more-or-less live, if not happily ever after, then with at least the strong implication that nothing very bad will happen to them in the future compared to what they just went through in the story.
But it turns out that the story I was told about these characters and their situations seems far less interesting than the story I now want to read.
It's true that all my favourites of his were the SF ones, and for the past decade or so Sleator had been writing much more supernatural/horror-ish-toned works which aren't really to my taste, but I don't think the apparently precipitous drop in quality is due to that, or my old faves holding up under the nostalgia filter (I reread some of them recently and it doesn't look like they were visited by what writer Jo Walton calls
The Suck Fairy and besides he was listed for some major kidlit awards for some of those ones, too, back in the day).
I think it really is a case of the combination of the new subgenre limiting what you can really do with your imagination within the subgenre conventions and typical reader expectations and Sleator's deteriorating writing ability (he was getting pretty old and was sickly near the end, according to his Wikipedia entry) not being inclined to do any more cool stuff like really and truly exploring the implications of, say a
lifestyle application of Einstein's Twin Paradox (
IN YOUR BACKYAAAAARD!) to sibling rivalry, or doing
When LARPers Attack!, or the usefulness of an
Escher-esque Skinner Box and Pavlovian conditioning in training orphans in your dystopic future to become SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER (maybe) with some nods to the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments, or even
homages to Flatland with bonus chemical chirality thrown in.
Because, I dunno, somehow battling the cursed cellphone and the zombie soul-snatcher seem kind of staid compared to that.
Although maybe a book about evils of standardized testing as a future quality-of-life determiner in conjunction with systematic bureaucratic corruption and graft resulting in the creation of an underclass of desperate opportunity-less masses excluded from the elite gated communities and run on the actual physical labour of exploited illegal immigrants* has greater resonance for today's teens than I would have thought.
Actually, the really worrisome thing is not that Sleator's final few books aren't that great (which is understandable at the tail end of a career), it's that the back blurbs provide him with a lot of praise and recommendations for them from respectable major book review outlets (likely chosen for flattery, but still).
If this is what's considered the good stuff for YA speculative fiction nowadays, then I have this morbid curiosity as to just how terribad is the mode?!?!
* That would be Sleator's
The Test, read several weeks prior to this.